Free Predator and Prey Prowlers 3 by Christopher Golden

and she smiled before shaking her head. “Pretty much everybody’s heard the things he’s said to me. But I don’t know for sure if anybody saw him grabbing at me.”
    Courtney closed her notebook and stood up, reaching for her cane. Her fingers closed on the silver lion’s head that topped the walking stick, and she squeezed tight, its contours jutting into the soft skin of her hand. The urge to hit someone with it was strong.
    “When are you scheduled to work again?” she asked, standing face to face with Janis.
    “Not until Wednesday.”
    “All right,” Courtney said. “I’ll see you on Wednesday. You won’t have to work with Dougie anymore.”
    “Oh,” Janis replied in a small voice. “Well, but what are you going to do tonight? I hate to leave you shorthanded.”
    “Jack and Molly will probably be back by six or so. They’re not on the schedule, but I’m sure I can shanghai one of them.”
    “Okay,” Janis said quickly. “Well, thank you. Really, Courtney. Thanks.”
    Touched by the gratitude in the girl’s voice, Courtney grew even angrier. The idea that Janis could be driven out of Bridget’s, made to risk her job by bailing in the middle of a shift because some jerk was harassing her . . . it stoked a fire in her that Courtney usually held a pretty tight rein on. Her mother would have called it an Irish temper. Courtney just thought of it as human nature.
    “Go on,” Courtney said, mustering a kind smile for Janis. “Go home.”
    Janis thanked her again and double-timed it into the back to get her things. Her half-eaten meal forgotten, Courtney went to the hostess stand by the front door. Wendy Bartlett sat at a table to the right of the door, beneath the windows that looked out on Nelson Street, and rolled sets of clean silverware up into green cloth napkins, something useful to kill the time before the dinner rush began.
    “Hey,” Courtney said.
    The second she saw the look on Courtney’s face, Wendy tensed up. “What is it?”
    Courtney shook her head. “I’ll tell you later. I may need you to wait tables once the rush starts.”
    Wendy shrugged. “You’ve got it.”
    That taken care of, Courtney hustled back toward the kitchen. She was such an expert with her cane after nearly a decade using it that her gait barely qualified as a hobble. She passed Janis on the way, who thanked her quietly one final time before leaving.
    When she pushed through the doors into the kitchen, Courtney spotted a pair of waitresses—Kiera Dunphy and Jenny Boyce—at the counter waiting to pick up dinner orders for their customers. They turned around the second she came in, and something in her expression wiped the smiles off their faces.
    “Kiera. Jenny. Give me a minute with the guys, will you?” Courtney asked.
    The waitresses exchanged a glance, then agreed quickly and went out into the dining room. A radio played WZLX somewhere back in the kitchen, and steam rose all around. The temperature was twenty or thirty degrees hotter back there, even with the air conditioner pumping, and when Tim Dunphy appeared behind the counter, his face was damp with perspiration and the tattoos on his arms gleamed. Tim was Kiera’s brother, a good guy from a rough South Boston neighborhood, and he ran the kitchen nine nights out of ten.
    “What’s up?” Tim asked, his Southie accent thick.
    “Can you come around here?” Courtney asked.
    Tim frowned. He ran a hand over the stubble on his shaved head. “Sure. How come?”
    Courtney didn’t respond, but she let him know with a look that she needed him to comply. She did not want to say it out loud, but it was important for the other kitchen staff to see Tim as being on her side, rather than on theirs. There were eight people on in the kitchen at the moment, five cooks and three dishwashers. Another cook would come on at five. But when she was done, they were going to be one man down for the shift, and that never made them happy.
    Tim came around the counter to